It’s a Pizza Pie with the Daring Bakers!

This months Daring Bakers’ Challenge is hosted by the lovely Rosa of Rosa’s Yummy Yums. She was to have hosted this month with Sher of What Did You Eat? and Glenna of A Fridge Full of Food but tragically Sher passed away suddenly in July leaving a rather large hole in the hearts of bloggers everywhere. Glenna has since suspended her Daring Bakers membership and that left Rosa all alone to host this month. She’s done a super job answering questions on the forum and giving moral support and she went ahead with an idea she attributes to Sher of doing Peter Reinhart’s Pizza Crust from “The Bread Baker’s Apprentice” as this month’s challenge. Check out Peter’s blog here and head on over to Rosa’s blog for the recipe.

This is lovely crust but it does take some planning ahead. You mix it up and then it needs to rest at least overnight in your fridge followed by a two hour rise before baking.  I think the planning ahead is worth it- it yields a very workable dough and a nice crisp but chewy crust for your toppings. 

I put dough in a parchment lined pie plate in the fridge instead of a jelly pan- I really don’t have that kind of space in my fridge hardly ever.  I also baked one on a stone and one on a pizza plate with a sheet of parchment on top. I used semolina to assemble on a peel and then slide to the stone. My sausage pizza stumbled a bit on the stone so it deformed slightly but was still delicious!

I chose to cut my dough into thirds instead of sixths for larger pizzas. It was a little trickier tossing it (which was one of Rosa’s requirements) but I did it. Unfortunately the camera didn’t cooperate and all you get is one pic of my hands in the dough so I’m giving you this video of “I Love Lucy” which is highly reminiscent of my usual pizza making experience- except I don’t have a sheeter to start the dough in the right direction.

I baked two pizzas and froze the one remaining crust for future use. I topped one with ground sweet Italian sausage, green peppers, marinara, shallots and Mozzarella. The other was topped with basil Pesto, Prosciutto, shallots and Mozzarella. Both were delicious! Thanks to Rosa for a fun challenge!

This recipe marks my thirteenth Daring Bakers’ challenge (I joined in September of 2007 when there were under 100 DBs -now there are over a thousand!- but I had to sit out July’s challenge) so I thought I would post thumbnails of my completed challenges as a celebration!

My Daring Bakers’ Dozen!

Love to you all and thanks for a year of wonderful challenges!

Check out the thousand or so other Daring Bakers here.